Minsk
(Belorussia)
On 6 March 1977 about 200 people took part in the traditional yearly meeting in memory of the 5,000 Jews shot in Minsk by the Hitlerites. Retired colonel Lev Petrovich OVSISHCHER gave a short speech. There was a minute of silence; a poem in Yiddish with a Russian translation; and a prayer.
The meeting was observed by the police (two patrol cars), several KGB employees and a woman representative of the City Soviet Executive Committee who continually urged the participants in the meeting to hurry up [1].
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Kishinyov
(Moldavia)
An unofficial Jewish seminar functions in Kishinev; it deals with the culture and history of the Jewish people and the life of the State of Israel.
On 9 April 1977 a mourning session of the seminar dedicated to the death of six million Jews during the Second World War was held. Victor Cheremshantsev gave a lecture on “The Totalitarian Regime of the Third Reich and the Jewish Tragedy”.
The seminar next met on 24 April. It was devoted to Israeli Independence Day, which this year fell on 21 April.
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On 14 April Cheremshantsev and his wife Goldstein, who have been waiting for permission to emigrate for seven months, and also refuseniks B. Bilbarer, A, Gleizer and M. Kats, were summoned to the head of the Kishinyov Visa & Registration Department (OVIR). The person who spoke to them said that they were conducting illegal assemblies and inciting a mood in favour of emigration; he asked from whom they received literature for the lectures and who had organized them, and he made an offer: “We’ll give you permission to emigrate, and you’ll help us.”
The same day this man talked to Jewish activist Yu. Yevdabsky, who had received permission to emigrate the day before. He said that Yevdabsky had been given permission prematurely, and proposed that he inform, in writing, on Yu. Shekhtman and his wife, and also on other activists in Kishinyov. Yevdabsky refused.
Then he was shown eight written denunciations (without the signatories surnames), which, besides Yevdabsky, mentioned R. and Yu. Shekhtman, L. and A. Shekhtman, S. Tartakovskaya and G. Levit. Yevdabsky was warned that if he did not provide a denunciation his permission to emigrate would be withdrawn. This threat was not, however, carried out.
*
On 19 April 1977 a conversation was held with Svetlana Abramovich, in whose flat the seminar met. She was told that if she let her home be used for the seminar her telephone would be removed and her flat taken away from her.
All who were summoned to the ‘chats’ were promised that criminal proceedings would be started against them.
*
In the second half of April about 100 families in Kishinyov received permission to emigrate to Israel. Amongst them were M. Grinberg, A. Roitman and M. Kats, who had all earlier been refused because of the “remoteness of their relationship” with the people who had invited them.
*
In issue No. 3 (1977) of the journal Sovietish Heimland (published in Moscow in Yiddish) an article was published about the Symposium on Jewish Culture (CCE 43.12, CCE 44.10). It represented the symposium as a provocation and its organizers as ‘layabouts’.
One of the members of the symposium’s organizing committee, Minsk refusenik Josif Goldin, called on the deputy chief editor of the journal in order to talk to him about the article. During the conversation (which was conducted in Yiddish) the man said that Jewish culture in the USSR was developing quite officially, moreover in Yiddish. He also said that latterly the authorities had reviewed their policy on this question and had promised to publish a text-book of the Yiddish language, to introduce optional teaching of Yiddish in schools in Birobidjan (Jewish Autonomous District, Soviet Far East), and to open a Jewish theatre studio in Moscow.
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Vilnius
(Lithuania)
In mid-April the leader of the Jewish seminar, Professor Naum Salansky (CCE 43.12), was informed that although an investigation had established his guilt (CCE 44.24 [3]), the case against him had been dropped since his crime was insignificant, and that his “security bar” had been withdrawn, so he could leave the country. He left the USSR on 21 April.
Member of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group Eitan Finkelshtein and his wife Alexandra Tsalkina have been warned at the KGB that if they do not stop their activities they will be tried for “Anti-Soviet Agitation & Propaganda” [2].
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Moscow
Josif Begun, who was arrested on 3 March 1977 (CCE 44.14), is being held in the investigations prison of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) on Matrosskaya Tishina Street.
On 25 March Begun [3] was told that the inquiry was finished and that he could study his ‘case’. Begun stated that he wished to do this with a defence lawyer. The investigator objected that defence participation in an inquiry, as distinct from a pre-trial investigation, was not provided for by law (Article 120, RSFSR Code of Criminal Procedure). Nevertheless, Begun declared a hunger-strike from 28 March.
At the beginning of May 1977 a demonstration of many thousands in defence of Begun and Shcharansky was held in New York. About 150 protest telegrams reached the court from abroad.
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The case was assigned for hearing by the people’s court of the city’s Proletarian district on 6 May. On this day all who wished to enter were allowed into the courtroom. The judge opened the session and announced that in the cell where Begun was being held a quarantine had been declared and it was impossible to bring the accused to the court; the trial was postponed until 27 May.
The next judicial session took place on 18 May. There Begun renounced the services of defence lawyer E.A. Reznikova. To allow time to find a new defence counsel the trial was postponed until 8 June [4].
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On 3 May 1977 searches were carried out at the homes of V. Brailovsky and V. Lazaris in connection with the journal Jews in the USSR.
In March-April the police warned refuseniks V. Lazaris, I. Essas and I. Beilin that they must find jobs.
Three-and-a-half years ago Josif Beilin was registered as a private teacher of mathematics. Ever since, he has given lessons and paid taxes. In spring 1977 the Kuibyshev district finance department, ignoring the written instruction of the city finance department, refused to re-register him. In reply to a complaint the district procurator stated that Beilin had the right to teach, but that “teaching serves as a cover for his other activities”. In mid-May Beilin continued to be visited by policemen. Beilin’s family has now been refused permission to emigrate for nearly six years because Beilin’s wife Dina once had a security pass, although as long ago as 1970 she left the department that was connected with secret work.
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Kiev
On the evening of 25 March 1977, when L.I. Mizrukhina left the 25th Clinical Hospital where she works as a doctor, two men came up to her.
One of them started hitting her, while the other looked on. Two passers-by came to Mizrukhina’s assistance; they forced her attackers to stop and summoned a police patrol car. When the car arrived an ‘observer’ showed the police a pass and spoke to them about something. The patrol car drove off. Then the same man advised Mizrukhina’s defenders to clear off quickly and to take her with them.
A year ago, Mizrukhina’s family submitted an application for emigration to Israel. They were refused because Mizrukhina’s husband, a construction engineer, had served in the army three years previously.
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FELDMAN
Between 20 and 30 April 1977, a few days after his release from camp, Alexander Feldman was urgently summoned to OVIR.
He was given permission to emigrate to Israel and told that he must leave the country before 8 May, otherwise he would be deported. Feldman asked for a postponement until the question of his brother’s emigration had been settled. “Your brother — that’s a different family!” came the answer. Feldman began to be openly and relentlessly shadowed. On 2 May at about 5 pm two men attacked him on a metro platform and knocked him down. They showed passes to the policeman summoned by the public and went off. When friends of Feldman were taking him home, stones were hurled at them from behind bushes.
On 4 May 1977 Feldman was summoned to the criminal investigation department for clarification of the circumstances of the attack on him. Head of Kiev OVIR Siforov, who turned out to be there, gave Feldman to understand that if he did not leave the USSR in the shortest possible space of time similar ‘incidents’ might occur.
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KISLIK
Vladimir Kislik was about to travel to the unofficial physics seminar (this issue CCE 45.18 [9]).
On 15 April 1977, when he took his seat in a carriage of the “Kiev-Moscow” train No. 16, a police sergeant and a citizen in civilian clothes who had entered behind him took him from the carriage by force and led him off to the police station. The duty police captain refused to acknowledge his participation in the detention or to give his surname. He pointed to two men in civilian clothes, explaining that they were “from a higher organization”. These also refused to give their surnames, saying that their chief would “explain everything”.
The ‘chief’, who appeared shortly after the train left, was known to Kislik. He had twice received Kislik in the office of head of the Kiev OVIR, presenting himself as an official of the republican Ukraine OVIR and calling himself first Gennady, then Genrikh (Alexandrovich). Neither then nor on this occasion did he give his surname or post. Gennady-Genrikh Alexandrovich told Kislik that he ought to go home, since “neither today nor in the next few days would he go to Moscow”. To Kislik’s question as to the reason for the violation by him and his men of Soviet law Gennady-Genrikh replied: “It’s for the general good.” On 18 April Kislik sent a complaint to the Kiev City Procurator, the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party and the CPSU Central Committee, which ends:
“My attempts to return or exchange my railway ticket have been persistently frustrated by ‘Gennady-Genrikh’s men’, who have followed me everywhere and tried to ‘persuade’ me to return home. They have accompanied me to the front door of my building and continued relentlessly to follow me up to the present time, meeting me at the front door and accompanying me back there, with a change of shift at about 3 pm.
“I request you to give an order for this matter to be investigated; to find and punish those guilty of violating Soviet laws; and to compensate me for the material loss I have suffered.
“I think that the violation of the law, the arbitrariness and force used against me in this case are equally dangerous for ordinary citizens and for the State itself. It is precisely this that has forced me to write to you.”
V. Kislik is a Cand.Sc. (Physics and Mathematics) and has been refused permission to emigrate for three years. His wife and child moved to Israel two years ago. He is obliged to work outside his profession.
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NOTES
- Compare Chronicle report on 1975 commemorative gathering in Minsk (CCE 39.4).
↩︎ - In a statement of 30 April 1977 Finkelshtein describes this warning and gives a full reply to it. See text in The Right to Know, note 2 (pp. 102-103).
↩︎ - On Begun, see CCE 23.6, CCE 26.7, CCE 44.14 and Name Index.
↩︎ - Two appeals on behalf of Begun, a practising Jew, were issued on 21 May and 3 June by the Christian Committee for the Defence of Believers Rights. The second appears in The Right to Know (1977//), note 2, p. 117.
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